‘I watch it to be close to him’: why Point Break is my feelgood movie

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For 25 years, I received texts from my best friend, Gary, that consisted of no intro, no signoff, just a quote from Point Break. “You’re a real blue-flame special, aren’t you, son?” was one. “The air got dirty and the sex got clean” was another. Once, as I opened a takeaway pizza, I received, with perfect timing: “I’m so hungry I could eat the ass-end out of a dead rhino.” Sometimes I would reply immediately or sometimes let a week slip by before firing off: “Lawyers don’t surf” or “Death on a stick out there, mate.”

You might say that Kathryn Bigelow’s 1991 action movie helped define who we were, or at least our friendship. Eighteen when it came out, we watched Point Break on spin-cycle at Gary’s house, thrilling to the tale of FBI rookie Johnny Utah (Keanu Reeves) going undercover as a surfer to flush out the identity of the Ex-Presidents, four guys who don the masks of Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon and Lyndon B Johnson to hit 27 banks in three years. Utah, a Rose Bowl quarterback before he blew out his knee, and sardonic, burnt-out veteran Pappas (Gary Busey) trace the chemicals in a strand of a suspect’s hair to Latigo Beach, Malibu. “Surfers are territorial, they stick to certain breaks,” Pappas tells Utah, and the bodacious dude from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure – who’s now, like, totally pumped – cosies up to surfer gal Tyler (Lori Petty) to infiltrate this tight-knit subculture.

In my teens, I adored Point Break for Bigelow’s fluent action as the FBI investigation ricochets from one set-piece to the next: dynamic bank heists; an explosive house raid; the greatest foot chase in cinema, the camera mounted on a specially designed “pogo-cam” to charge through back yards and suburban houses, over gates and chain-link fences; and not one but two awe-inspiring skydiving sequences. It wasn’t until some years later that I came to appreciate how Bigelow is undercutting the macho swagger of the Hollywood action movie even as she mounts muscular set-pieces beyond anything mustered by the guys – even, perhaps, her then partner James Cameron.

At the centre of the carnage is a bromance between Johnny and lead surfer/Ex-President Bodhi (Patrick Swayze) that makes Top Gun look straight. “I know you want me so bad, it’s like acid in your mouth,” says our adrenalin-junkie “villain”, not long after Utah has a chance to shoot him fleeing a heist in his Reagan mask; instead they interminably lock eyes before Johnny discharges his weapon into the air with an animalistic howl. Together they grapple while playing football on the beach, or emerging from the surging sea, or tumbling through the sky at 10,000ft. A shared adrenalin kink pulls them together until they’re all over each other like sex wax on a surfboard. Yes, Bigelow’s film pointedly informs us that surfers apply just this product for traction.

Each time I watch Point Break now, I wonder how all of this homoeroticism passed my younger self by, but then I need only look at the contemporary reviews to see that everyone else missed it too. “These two rocketheads … spend most of the pic trying to throttle or maim each other,” noted Variety, before dismissing their relationship as “not very interesting”.

The movie has grown for me in other ways, too. I now understand why Johnny so welcomes ditching his office suit for a wetsuit, hanging on Bodhi’s every mystic-malarkey word as he tells his brahs: “We stand for something. To those dead souls inching along the freeways in their metal coffins, we show them that the human spirit is still alive.” It’s a philosophy that resonated as I myself took an office job, albeit as a film journalist. And as each decade brought with it more responsibility, I found myself returning to Point Break for the endless blue skies, the sun-soaked beaches, the silver ocean with its gold-crested waves, and the all-night parties on fire-lit beaches. The CGI-heavy 2016 remake could get in the sea; I only have man-hugs for the original.

Naturally I would text Gary each time I immersed myself into this stirring world. “You’re gonna be fish food,” I’d send. Or perhaps: “He’ll take you to the edge. Past it.” Then, two-and-a-half years ago, Gary died of a heart attack, aged 50. It’s a loss I still can’t comprehend, and now I watch Point Break to be close to him. Sometimes I scroll through our messages. The last one was sent at 11.57pm on 29 September 2023, a week before his death. It read, simply: “Are we gonna jump or jerk off?” I never responded, but even now I feel a pull to reply. If I ever do, I know what I’ll write: “Adios, amigo.”